Chapter 28 A Hundred Thousand Souls #2
It is notable, too, that most of these ghosts were women or members of the underclasses. That should surprise no one. Those who lack power in life carry an unequal share of injustice into death. Returning from the grave is their only recourse to right those wrongs.
And you, as a ghost, definitely have a lot of injustice to be angry about.
The first of these was Baba’s death, and the lies your mother told to cover it up. Mami’s abandonment was the next such event; it severed any lingering belief you had that familial love could ever be enough.
Being betrayed by Mei Chi was the next one. You will never forget that night, the shocked realization filtering through: this unfair death is what happened to Mei Chi. Followed by, This unfair death is what Mei Chi did to me.
If she’d done it by accident, that would have been forgivable. But she stalked you, lured you, tried to charm you into drowning, all to sate her egotistical loneliness. And when that didn’t work, she drowned you by force, taking everything.
In the wake of her disappearance, you have nothing left except your anger: at her, at your mother, at the world, at the invaders who have derailed planetary peace.
Mei Chi was out of reach while the war was going on, the city too dangerous to search.
So you have chosen to go to war, and see if you can’t do your bit to end it that much faster.
War, after all, is nothing more than a collective societal excuse to kill each other with skill and style, and celebrate it proudly. In peacetime you’d be a monster of legendary violence, but in the heart of the Second World War, you are well on the way to being a hero.
Three years of fighting, three years of drowning soldiers, taking their skins, infiltrating their camps and boats and once a submarine—admittedly, that venture was unsuccessful—to disrupt their plans.
All in all, the days have been running by in a blur, so fast you can hardly count them. And suddenly you are here, August 6, 1945.
Another landmark moment in your life.
The resistance fighters almost shoot you when you return, but you’re used to that, and so are they.
It’s hard for them; you leave as one skin, come back as another.
Almost always you are wearing a Japanese soldier of some description, and they can’t keep track.
If they don’t stay vigilant, then one of these days an actual soldier will walk up and they’ll not kill him in time.
You shout out the password, which changes every three days.
“Stand down,” says one of the veterans to a trigger-happy youngster; he’s new to this group. “It’s only Thousand-Faced Girl.”
The Girl with a Thousand Faces, or sometimes just Thousand-Faced Girl. That’s what they call you in this camp. It’s not strictly accurate—your count is barely above two hundred, if that—but you rather like it. A nice myth, as it were.
There are other ghosts among the resistance fighters.
You joining up opened the door wide for other supernatural helpers.
Few as versatile or powerful, but plenty can help in other ways.
Little grandmother ghosts who sew uniforms, for example.
The waiting women who wander the woods and catch Japanese patrols unawares with their ribbon necks and savage teeth.
Fire-breathers who cause havoc in guerilla raids.
And others, many others. The main criteria is being able to listen to orders.
Offer up a cheerful smile to the men on guard, and saunter along past. They fall back at your approach, saluting respectfully. Only Wing Yun has ever seen your true form, or known your real name, and even then he couldn’t see through the glamour.
It’s Wing Yun’s tent you head to first. The whole of this resistance cell is based in the forests and hills of Sai Kung, makeshift tents pitched among the trees and rain and boggy ground.
It is always humid, rarely comfortable, but still better than a POW camp.
Which is the only alternative for these men and women.
“I hear it was a rousing success.” Wing Yun doesn’t even look up as you enter. He’s bent over a folding desk, rickety from age and rust. “But I’m keen to hear a direct report.”
He’s benefited from your success. Together, you have taken on a slew of impossible operations, the pair of you rising through resistance ranks in record time.
You’ve tried working with other soldiers, and didn’t like them nearly as much.
None of the others were as charming, or as intelligent.
The fact that he is extraordinarily good-looking doesn’t hurt, either.
“What you heard was correct.” Grab a seat, slump into it lazily. “The boat sank like a stone. Lives were lost and it did a lot of damage in port. The information you gave me was gold. As usual.”
“That’s a relief,” he says, grinning, and you grin back.
Sometimes his information isn’t, and the infiltration jobs go wrong, but you rarely mind. Unless the men have an exorcist aboard—and those are in short supply these days—there isn’t a fucking thing they can do to you.
The best part: there are never any witnesses. If it goes wrong you simply leave, and the Japanese think they had a traitor in their midst. If it goes right, they all die, with no one left alive to spread awkward rumors. They have no idea that a single “lady ghost” is causing them so much havoc.
“What’s our next action?”
“Already moving on?” He sounds amused. “How nice it must be, to never sleep, hey?”
“I would tell you that I’ll sleep when I’m dead, but I’m already dead and that hasn’t happened,” you say dryly. “So, I’ll sleep when my spirit moves to the underworld. How’s that?”
“Fair enough! Well, we dealt an incredible blow tonight. But this location”—he stabs a finger at the map on his table—“will be of vital importance if we—”
The world disappears briefly. Your senses are overwhelmed by a wash of white lights and a sound that reminds you of radio static.
Somewhere far to the north, reality distorts.
A force so violent and destructive that it hardly bears imagining has rocked the world, sending repercussions that a spirit can feel with every wisp of their being.
You stagger, gasping, hands clutching over your head. As if that could make any difference to the reverberant sensation you’ve just experienced.
“Siu Yin?” Wing Yun approaches, hovering near you with worry on his face. “What is wrong?”
You tear out of the tent, stumbling to your knees in the dirt.
Hiroshima is over two thousand kilometers away, too far to see the nuclear blast with physical eyes. You do not yet know the name of the city that just died in a single breath, or its exact location.
But you feel it, oh so clearly. You and every other ghost or medium from here to China to Russia to Guam and all the places in between—you all feel the spiritual energy of a hundred thousand souls, plus other living animals and plants, as they are converted from flesh to spirit.
“What is it?” Wing Yun is outside, next to you now. He hasn’t missed the collective reaction of the camp’s gathered spirits. “What’s happening?”
“Something terrible,” you say, surprised to find yourself weeping. “A horrible act of destruction. I don’t have words—”
Wing Yun takes your hand, giving it a squeeze. Hesitantly, you squeeze back, both of you kneeling in the damp earth beneath a quiet sky. He doesn’t understand, can’t know yet what you’ve sensed. But he knows you are distressed, and that’s enough.
Against all the cruel and dark things you’ve experienced in this world, that one act of kindness is precious, and you hold it close in your fractured heart.